Saturday, February 11, 2012

The same high school where my oldest daughters Emily and Virginia graduated. Something is wrong with this story, not that it would be surprising.

Via John

A Marine sergeant fatally shot by an Orange County Sheriff's deputy in a dark San Clemente high school parking lot this week was not armed and the incident doesn't appear to be alcohol- or drug-related, sheriff's officials said.

A sheriff's spokesman said the deputy feared for the safety of two young girls sitting in a parked car when he shot Marine Sgt. Manuel Loggins Jr. Tuesday. The shooting occurred as Loggins started to get into the SUV where his two daughters — ages 9 and 14 — were sitting, authorities said.

Jim Amormino, a spokesman for the Sheriff's Department, said the deputy was fearful that Loggins — who he said appeared to be acting irrationally — was about the drive off with the girls.

"The real threat that was perceived was the safety of the children," Amormino said.

"The deputy formed an opinion that he had a deep concern for the children, that he would not allow Mr. Loggins to drive away with the kids," Amormino said.

A former commanding officer said Loggins routinely went to the school during the early morning with his daughters to walk the track and read the Bible.

Friends: Dead Marine always answered ‘Yes, sir’

"........colleagues, friends and family of the Marine are trying to make sense of what happened early Tuesday morning, saying the few details they know are contradictory to what they know of Loggins, a respected and religious Marine who followed the chain of command and expected everyone else to do so as well.

"He always set the example and set the bar high for everyone," said Mark Raymond, who was in the Marines from 2004 to 2008. Loggins served as Raymond's sergeant in 2005, while the two were stationed in Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii.

"I wish everyone had a sergeant like I did," Raymond said. "He watched out for you."

Colleagues described the Camp Pendleton Marine as a disciplined person who answered superiors and teachers with a "Yes, sir," or "Yes, ma'am."

People who knew Loggins said erratic behavior was not like him.

A married father to three children with a fourth on the way, Loggins spent years in the military and was known to show to respect to superiors, friends said.

"If someone asked him to do something, it was, 'Yes, sir,' or 'No, sir,'" said Darlene Patino, who attended Stanbridge College with Loggins, who was studying to be a nurse. "If an officer told him to get on the ground, he's going to do it and, 'Yes, sir.'"

Whitney Houston, who ruled as pop music’s queen until her majestic voice and regal image were ravaged by drug use, erratic behavior and a tumultuous marriage to singer Bobby Brown, has died. She was 48.

Houston’s publicist, Kristen Foster, said Saturday that the singer had died, but the cause and the location of her death were unknown.

News of Houston’s death came on the eve of music’s biggest night—the Grammy Awards. It’s a showcase where she once reigned, and her death was sure to case a heavy pall on Sunday’s ceremony. Houston’s longtime mentor Clive Davis was to hold his annual concert and dinner Saturday; it was unclear if it was going to go forward.

At her peak, Houston the golden girl of the music industry. From the middle 1980s to the late 1990s, she was one of the world’s best-selling artists. She wowed audiences with effortless, powerful, and peerless vocals that were rooted in the black church but made palatable to the masses with a pop sheen.

Her success carried her beyond music to movies, where she starred in hits like “The Bodyguard” and “Waiting to Exhale.”

She had the he perfect voice, and the perfect image: a gorgeous singer who had sex appeal but was never overtly sexual, who maintained perfect poise.

Incessant Northern slavery agitation, encouragement of slave insurrection, and Northern nullification of federal law caused the secession of many Southern States in early 1861. The war itself was caused by Lincoln’s military coercion of South Carolina, a power his predecessor asserted a president did not possess. Lincoln blockaded North Carolina’s coast on April 27, 1861 -- a State with strong Union sympathy – an act which facilitated the secession of The Old North State. Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission www.ncwbts150.com "The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial" “The war cost the life of one soldier, Rebel or Yankee, for every six slaves freed and for every ten white Southerners saved for the union. (Potter, 261). The money spent to field the two armies would have purchased the liberty of the four million slaves five times over.” (Tombee, Portrait of a Cotton Planter, Theodore Rosengarten, Morrow & Company, 1986, page 212.) “The direct financial cost of the operation of the American (War Between the States) was about $8,000,000,000, which, with destruction of property, derangement of the power of labor, pension system and other economic losses, is increased until the total reached thirty billions of dollars.” (The Awful Cost of War, Confederate Veteran Magazine, page 389.) “Lincoln’s war ended up costing 620,000 battlefield deaths along with the death of some 50,000 Southern civilians, including thousands of slaves who perished in the federal bombardment of Southern cities and because of the devastation of the Southern economy. By 1865, the Lincoln government had killed one out of every four Southern white males between the ages of twenty and forty.” (The Culture of Death, Dr. Thomas DiLorenzo, 2001.) “The number of Confederate soldiers in Northern prisons, 220,000; the number of Northern soldiers in Southern prisons, 270,000. The death rate in Northern prisons was 12%, in Southern prisons it was less than 9%. These prison statistics are taken from the report of Secretary Stanton made July 19, 1866, and corroborated by the report of Surgeon-General Barnes the following June.” Confederate Veteran Magazine, November 1897, page 561. “…2,326,168 men of the North and 750,000 Southerners took part in the struggle. Of these, according to Fox’s estimates in the Photographic History, Vol. X, the North lost 259,000 men killed in the field and died of wounds and disease; and the South lost 135,000 all told. In this stupendous conflict, therefore, the loss aggregated nearly half a million lives lost and ruined in the armies, and even a greater number of Negro lives caused by neglect, disease and starvation, making a total of upwards of a million human lives. Not only this, but the women and children….suffered miseries. Then at the South there was a desolation of ruin and poverty estimated in the long run at twenty billions of dollars.” (A Southern View of the Invasion of the Southern States, Captain S.A. Ashe, 1935, page 64.)

American conservative icon Robert Alphonso Taft was born in 1889 at Cincinnati, the son of President William Howard Taft. A graduate of Yale and Harvard, he entered the lower house of the Ohio General Assembly in 1921 and became Republican leader of that body in 1925, and Speaker in 1926; He served in the Ohio Senate during 1931-32, and in 1939 he took his seat in the United States Senate. He was the conservative Republican front-runner for the 1952 Republican presidential nomination, but was passed over by dominant liberal Republicans in favor of political newcomer General Dwight Eisenhower

“[The Democratic Party New Dealers and Roosevelt] have no concern whatever for individual freedom. They are collectivists, like Marx and Lenin and Mussolini. They believe in a planned economy; that the Government should regulate every detail of industrial and commercial agricultural life. They are willing to sacrifice individual freedom in order supposedly to improve the conditions of the poor and increase their material welfare. But in this purpose the policy has completely failed….

If any policy leans backward and not forward, it is the policy of spending billions of borrowed money and piling up tremendous debt for future generations to pay. A policy which inevitably leads to bankruptcy and inflation of the currency will only make the poor people poorer but is likely to force a socialism which will utterly deprive them of individual freedom.” Senator Robert A. Taft, Republican, Ohio.

(The Political Principles of Robert A. Taft, Russell Kirk and James McClellan, Fleet Press, 1967, pp. 36-37)

Barack Obama may have just lost the election. He has foolishly gone to war in an election year with tens of millions of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews – Democrat, Republican, and independent alike. He has thrown down a radical feminist gauntlet and dared the Church to pick it up.

They’ve picked it up.

From running up trillions in debt and deficit, to the vast expansion of the size and scope of federal bureaucracy, Mr. Obama has done more in three years to supplant our 236 year-old Constitutional Republic with a Euro-style socialist autocracy – than a lesser Marxist could have accomplished in a lifetime.

But controlling the purse strings is not nearly enough. A central element of full-blown secular-socialism is the suppression of religious liberty – principally, freedom of conscience.

Karl Marx once said: “The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.”

Russia's main gas-company, Gazprom, was unable to meet demand last weekend as blizzards swept across Europe, and over three hundred people died. Did anyone even think of deploying our wind turbines to make good the energy shortfall from Russia?

Of course not. We all know that windmills are a self-indulgent and sanctimonious luxury whose purpose is to make us feel good. Had Europe genuinely depended on green energy on Friday, by Sunday thousands would be dead from frostbite and exposure, and the EU would have suffered an economic body blow to match that of Japan's tsunami a year ago. No electricity means no water, no trams, no trains, no airports, no traffic lights, no phone systems, no sewerage, no factories, no service stations, no office lifts, no central heating and even no hospitals, once their generators run out of fuel.

This link is for a young Texas group, The Ivey’s. “Lady Made of Stone” is the first video and single release for their new album. I’d spend a couple of paragraphs bragging on these kids, but their music speaks for itself. The music they write is wonderfully complex and multi-dimensional and allows us to do the storytelling. Our production company did the video (from storyboard to the final retouches) and we’re pretty darned proud of it.

PS – As you can see from the credits even though we’re a very smallproduction company, this was a true family project. The band are ourcousins, my daughter wrote the storyboard, my sons worked as AP and gripand my husband did his magic as jack of all trades from director tocamera to editing. The best thing about small business in America isbeing able to watch your kids grow and develop their own talents. Notbad for a bunch of farm and ranch kids from Texas.

Every so often, a local news story about a victim of crime goes national. Most recently, it was Sarah McKinley, 18, home alone with her 3-month-old son, a few days after Sarah’s husband had died of lung cancer. Two men apparently looking to steal pain medicine prescribed for the husband broke in. Sarah grabbed a shotgun and a pistol and killed Justin Martin as he forced entry into her home.

How often do such incidents happen? While the results from studies vary, the numbers are large. The National Crime Victimization Survey, for various procedural reasons, is at the low end, showing 108,000 such cases a year (although this was some years back, when crime rates were higher than now). The widely reported Kleck/Gertz study, which has its own set of problems, showed a range of 830,000 to 2.45 million defensive gun uses per year. Other studies have fallen solidly in the middle, with hundreds of thousands of defensive gun uses per year.

Our study examines a variety of incident types: concealed-weapon permit holders (285 accounts); home invasions (1,227 incidents); residential burglaries (488). There are categories that we would never have thought were all that common: 172 incidents where people defended themselves from animal attacks (some wild, some dogs gone wild); 34 were incidents where pizza delivery drivers defended themselves from robbery.

After a long day of supposed “accommodation” and discussion, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops took a close look at the supposed adjustment of the HHS mandate yesterday. Their conclusion? It represents no change at all, and the bishops will press for a “legislative solution” to Barack Obama’s mandate:

These changes require careful moral analysis, and moreover, appear subject to some measure of change. But we note at the outset that the lack of clear protection for key stakeholders—for self-insured religious employers; for religious and secular for-profit employers; for secular non-profit employers; for religious insurers; and for individuals—is unacceptable and must be corrected. And in the case where the employee and insurer agree to add the objectionable coverage, that coverage is still provided as a part of the objecting employer’s plan, financed in the same way as the rest of the coverage offered by the objecting employer. This, too, raises serious moral concerns.

We just received information about this proposal for the first time this morning; we were not consulted in advance. Some information we have is in writing and some is oral. We will, of course, continue to press for the greatest conscience protection we can secure from the Executive Branch. But stepping away from the particulars, we note that today’s proposal continues to involve needless government intrusion in the internal governance of religious institutions, and to threaten government coercion of religious people and groups to violate their most deeply held convictions. In a nation dedicated to religious liberty as its first and founding principle, we should not be limited to negotiating within these parameters. The only complete solution to this religious liberty problem is for HHS to rescind the mandate of these objectionable services.

We will therefore continue—with no less vigor, no less sense of urgency—our efforts to correct this problem through the other two branches of government. For example, we renew our call on Congress to pass, and the Administration to sign, the Respect for Rights of Conscience Act. And we renew our call to the Catholic faithful, and to all our fellow Americans, to join together in this effort to protect religious liberty and freedom of conscience for all.

Cave paintings in Malaga, Spain, could be the oldest yet found – and the first to have been created by Neanderthals.

Looking oddly akin to the DNA double helix, the images in fact depict the seals that the locals would have eaten, says José Luis Sanchidrián at the University of Cordoba, Spain. They have "no parallel in Palaeolithic art", he adds. His team say that charcoal remains found beside six of the paintings – preserved in Spain's Nerja caves – have been radiocarbon dated to between 43,500 and 42,300 years old.

That suggests the paintings may be substantially older than the 30,000-year-old Chauvet cave paintings in south-east France, thought to be the earliest example of Palaeolithic cave art.

The next step is to date the paint pigments. If they are confirmed as being of similar age, this raises the real possibility that the paintings were the handiwork of Neanderthals – an "academic bombshell", says Sanchidrián, because all other cave paintings are thought to have been produced by modern humans.

Neanderthals are in the frame for the paintings since they are thought to have remained in the south and west of the Iberian peninsula until approximately 37,000 years ago – 5000 years after they had been replaced or assimilated by modern humans elsewhere in their European heartland.

Until recently, Neanderthals were thought to have been incapable of creating artistic works. That picture is changing thanks to the discovery of a number of decorated stone and shell objects – although no permanent cave art has previously been attributed to our extinct cousins.

In 2011, according to data I have collected, police officers in the United States shot 1,146 people, killing 607. Since January 1, 2011, I have been using the internet to compile a national database of police involved shootings. The term "police involved shooting" pertains to law enforcement officers who, in the line of duty, discharge their guns. When journalists and police administrators use the term, they include the shooting of animals and shots that miss their targets. My case files only include instances in which a person is either killed or wounded by police gunfire. My data also includes off-duty officers who discharged their weapons in law enforcement situations. They don't include, for example, officers using their firearms to resolve personal disputes....

In 2010, 59 officers were shot to death among 122 killed while on the job. This marked a 20 percent jump from 2009 when 49 officers were killed by gunfire. In 2011, 173 officers died, from all causes, in the line of duty. The fact police officers feel they are increasingly under attack from the public may help explain why they are shooting so many citizens.

The 2011 figure is 71 officers shot to death. Of course, since there are 310 million Americans and only 800,000 police, this would tend to indicate that the public is winning even though the police are killing 8.55 citizens for every police officer killed.

The interesting thing is that we seldom hear anywhere nearly as much opposition to police killings as we do to the death penalty, even though 18 times more people are killed by police than are executed on an annual basis. Since only 33 people were executed throughout the USA in 2011, compared to the 607 who were shot and killed without trial, it would appear that death penalty opponents would do much better to protest lethally armed police than lethal judicial judgments.

Award-winning actor and humanitarian Gary Sinise is going to make sure Cpl. J.B. Kerns’ dream of a log cabin on the Ararat River becomes a reality.

Sinise announced today that the Gary Sinise Foundation and The Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers Foundation (named after the NY firefighter who perished on 9/11), are partnering as part of their Building For America’s Bravest program to build a “smart home” for Kerns that will allow him to live independently.

Kerns lost both legs and his right arm last April as a result of a blast from an improvised explosive device (IED) while on his third tour of duty in Afghanistan. The heroic Marine, who’s had to undergo dozens of surgeries, is from Ararat—a small, rural town in Patrick County, about 30 miles from Martinsville Speedway.

The fundraising centerpiece for the project will be a concert performed by Sinise and his Lt. Dan Band at Martinsville High School on Saturday, March 31, at 7 p.m, and 100% of the ticket sales will go toward funding the specially-equipped smart home for Kerns. The next day, at the running of the Goody’s Fast Relief 500 at Martinsville Speedway, Sinise and Kerns will play a special role in the Speedway’s pre-race program.

Remembrance

To die for one’s country is not only an act of bravery, it is THE act of bravery. For soldiers, it is just an extension of their military career, a part of their duty. As leaders have asked their soldiers to sacrifice themselves for the good of the society, it is only right for leaders to go through the same motion. They should practice what they have preached.

As war is seen as a noble act, tu sat serves as redemption in case of defeat. It is also a way to tell the enemy: “You might have won the battle/war but you don’t deserve to win because you don’t have the chinh nghia (just cause).” And it is not only just cause: it is the moral belief that the cause they are fighting for deserves their total sacrifice. Continues below

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Core Creek Militia

==============================My sixth great grandfather, his wife, and five of his six children were killed in battle with the Tuscarora Indians at Core Creek, NC.

The Seven Blackbirds

==============================My third great grandfather was an Ensign in the Revolutionary War, and saved his unit's flag after being wounded at the Battle of Brandywine. He was also at Kingston (Kinston), Wilmington, Charleston, Two Sisters and Augusta. He was at the defeat at Brier Creek and also Bee Creek.

Requiem Aeternam -
Eternal Rest Grant unto Them
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My second great grandfather was killed in action on May 3, 1863 at the Battle of Chancellorsville.
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My great grandfather and great uncle knew all the men in the "Civil War Requiem" video as they were part of the 53rd NC which was the sole unit defending Fort Mahone. (Fort Mahone was named "Fort Damnation" by the Yankees) *Handpicked men of the 53rd (My great grandfather was one of these) made the final, night assault at Petersburg in an attempt to break Grant's line. This was against Fort Stedman which was a few miles to the slight northeast. They initially succeeded, but reinforcements drove them back. This video is made from photographs which were taken the day after the 53rd evacuated the lines the night before to begin the retreat to Appomattox. I have many more pictures taken by the same photographer, one of these shows a 14 year old boy and the other is the famous picture of the blond, handsome soldier with his musket.
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*General Gordon promised the men a gold medal and 30 days leave if they accomplished their task and many years after the War my great grandfather wrote General Gordon, who was then governor of Georgia about this incident. They exchanged several letters which I have framed. See first link below.
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*The Attack On Fort Stedman
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"His Colored Friends"
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Lee's Surrender
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My Black NC Kinfolks
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Punished For Being Caught!

Great Grandfather Koonce

He was a drummer boy in the WBTS, survived the War only to die a few years later. He was caught in an ice storm on his way home, but instead of seeking shelter, continued on his horse until the end. His clothes had to be cut off and he died a few days later.